By Kristina Schneider, Practice Success Coach

Too often for most people, there’s far too much to do and not enough time to do it.  This requires a balancing act of figuring out how to prioritize your work.

For most people, the work that gets set aside are the non-important, but also sadly, the non-urgent and important items.  The things that you know you need to get to, but that don’t have a looming deadline to be met.  Those tasks will constantly be backburnered into an oblivion, perhaps for eternity.

We implement what is known as the “Urgent & Important” (or “U & I”) Rule to help us avoid needless interruptions.  What this means is that the item that requires interrupting another, whether it’s assistant to boss, boss to assistant, or coworkers to coworkers, meets the criteria of both urgent and important.  Following what is known as the Covey Time Management Matrix (shown below), named after Steven Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you can see a framework for prioritizing your time and tasks for optimized efficiency and productivity.

While this time management and interruption reducing rule is helpful when followed, the hard part becomes when there’s an excess of both urgent and important items popping up.  Then everything becomes a fire drill and chaos and you’re never able to get to the things you’ve scheduled yourself to work on.

So, that leaves us to the answer the burning question, “How do you prioritize when everything is urgent and important?”

Our business coach recently shared with me an article that addresses just this question and I thought it was a fantastic read so I wanted to share it with all of you.  There’s some very practical and helpful tips worth reviewing.

I hope that you find this article as helpful as I did.  If you would like some further guidance about how we can assist you with setting up better time management systems in your firm, please feel free to drop me an e-mail and I can point you in the right direction of the services and training programs we have available here at The Ultimate Estate Planner.

Until then, I hope that you take some time out of your busy schedule to try and implement some of the tips shared here to help you get better control of your time, your calendar, and your life!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Schneider is a Practice Success Coach at The Ultimate Estate Planner, Inc.  She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Pepperdine University in 2004 and was hired right out of college to work for the Law Firm of Kavesh, Minor & Otis, coordinating and facilitating Philip Kavesh’s “Missing Link” Boot Camps while also providing administrative support to Mr. Kavesh as his Executive Assistant for over seven years.  Through her direct hands-on experience in Mr. Kavesh’s law firm, Kristina has assited numerous estate planning professionals through The Ultimate Estate Planner and, equally as important, many of their staff members, in the successful implementation of Ultimate Estate Planner’s products and systems. She is currently pursuing her MBA degree from Pepperdine University Graziadio Business School.  You can reach Kristina at (424) 247-9495 or by e-mail at kristina@ultimateestateplanner.com.